In the month that Britain said a final goodbye to Harry Patch, the last surviving veteran of the First World War trenches, Stevenage Museum is launching a public appeal to find out more about local men who also fought in and survived the conflict.

Researchers at the Museum want to tell the personal stories of the men in a new interactive exhibition, A Soldier's Experience, which opens on October 24 2009. They are looking for anyone who had family from Stevenage involved in the First World War to provide information, stories or photographs.

"We have done some research of all the names of the people on the war memorial in Stevenage but now we want to put together a picture of the people who survived the War," said Museum Curator Claire Sutton. "It is surprisingly difficult to research the men who survived, which is why we want people to come forward with their stories."

Research so far has focused on 12 local people, and the Museum is keen to find out more about their experiences. The stories will then augment the exhibition, which will invite visitors to travel through a recruiting office, a trench, a casualty post and a final section dealing with remembrance.

"The idea is that you will pick up a card with the details of one of the local soldiers and follow their experiences through the exhibition, which is very tactile and will have things like kitbags that you can lift up to see how heavy it was," explained Sutton. "We want to evoke the experience of joining up – and allow people to explore ideas of conflict, duty and remembrance themselves."

Pic courtesy Stevenage Museum

The research, which will be added to the Museum's archive, is part of the ongoing Their Past Your Future project which has already seen the Museum work with the local Nobel Secondary School to explore and contextualise educational visits to the Somme Battlefields of Word War One.

A video of their experiences will be shown in the exhibition, and staff are currently working on a follow-up intergenerational project in which veterans will meet with pupils to explore issues of remembrance.